e-Business Essentials: Job1—e-Proceedings

AD&P's first-ever conference has come and gone. Not only will the party held along with Sun Microsystems and i2 be long remembered, but the speakers provided some outstanding insights into issues they are grappling with. So if you weren't there, here's some of what you missed—and some tools you can use.


Compiled by Colleen DeJong, Online EditorColleen's BioWrite Colleen

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To listen to the audio quotes included in the e-Proceedings you may need to download RealPlayer. It's quick and free (and you can also use it to listen to MP3's...but you didn't hear that from us).
This book asks the question: are we really improving our processes through technology?
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity, by Alan Cooper
Rick Vanzura, Chief Strategy Officer of GM Information Systems & Services, stresses GM's role in the automotive e-business revolution.

He goes on, though, to explain that the key thing that needs to happen in the future is to fully integrate and internalize e-commerce efforts.


Covisint—Co-founded by several automakers, this e-Commerce site was discussed by several speakers as the potential pipeline for supply chain exchanges.

GM BuyPower—One of GM's e-business exchanges, GM BuyPower is only a piece of GM's e-business pie.

Martin Piszczalski, industry analyst, outlines four potential e-commerce structures for the auto industry of the future: The mega-hub, which is Covisint for the time being; private exchanges, or virtual private networks, like GM's GMTradeXchage; many niche 3rd parties providing specific services like eSteel or Grainger—in this scenario, you would cobble together a set of aps that best suit your purposes; and the extended enterprise where suppliers and OEMs use enhanced ERP and CAx systems to exchange data and do business. While Piszczalski refused to pick a potential winner, he did provide recommendations on how to proceed with your e-business strategies.
Doug Buchanan, a management consultant for ANXeBusiness Corp., emphasized the importance of a simplified, safe, secure, reliable backbone on which to build new e-business paradigms in the automotive industry. While he feels that ANX can be that backbone, he feels its potential can only be fully realized if we drop a few of our preconceived notions.

If ANX indeed becomes that backbone, it can impact automotive e-commerce in sevaral ways.

Learn more about ANX:
• ANXeBusiness

Hayes Lemmerz International's IS Director for the Suspension Components Business, Kelly Knepley explains that e-commerce at HLI is a matter of making its interaction with suppliers and OEMs more efficient, further integrating HLI's different divisions to increase capabilities, and improving processes across the board...all of which improve the bottom line.

Knepley also made it a point to explain what Internet-enabled tools suppliers would be most interested in getting their hands on, and where, perhaps Covisint needs to be focusing it's application-building efforts.

Knepley had good things to say about the Xpedio Content Management system from Intranet Solutions that they use at Hayes Lemmerz.

One of the underlying themes of the conference is that there are no real answers as to which e-commerce model will work for your company. Rick Radecki, Delphi Automotive's Corporate Director, e-Business points out that in the e-commerce realm, there's nothing wrong with a little experimentation.

Much of Radecki's presentation centered around how Delphi is leveraging the Internet and e-business to improve relationships. Check out Delphi's Suppliers web site and see how they're cementing relationships for yourself.
At L&L Products, they use i-Supply from SupplySolution to work with their suppliers at getting leaner and leaner.

Co-authored by keynote speaker Amory Lovins, this book addresses how to make businesses "far more profitable by behaving as if nature and people were properly valued."
• Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins.
According to Stephen Harley one of the tools Ford's Logistics dept. is using to streamline things is the Autogistics program at UPS.